Talk: "A Threat to What? Private Consultancies Managing “Risk” in Higher Education" by Rachel Ida Buff (Mellon Sawyer Seminar Series)

• Event Date: Thursday, March 5, 2026
• Time: 5:00 pm–6:30 pm (CST)
• Location: Knight Auditorium, Spurlock Museum, 600 S. Gregory St., Urbana, IL

• Talk

In this third presentation of the At Risk U event series Professor Buff, Professor of History and Director of the Culture and Communities Program at the University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, will historicize the advent of private consultancies in the 20th century—a development that accompanied the ascendance of managerial capitalism and the military industrial complex. These consultancies made their way into higher education during the 1980s as part of neoliberal “reform” of education; they gained more traction through disaster capitalism following the Great Recession of 2008 and the Covid-19 Pandemic. The talk examines the practices and consequences of this ubiquitous for-profit, industry. Often invisible to students and academic workers, private consultancies are reshaping the contemporary university, with important consequences for workplace democracy and governance as well as academic freedom.

The At Risk U event series is part of a larger faculty project examining the emergence of risk management as a deeply ingrained organizing feature and priority of modern US universities, and considers its implications for academic freedom and democratic governance. For more information visit At Risk U: the Past, Present & Future of Academic Freedom (external link).

About the Speaker

Rachel Ida Buff (external link) is Professor of History and Director of the Culture and Communities Program at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. Her research and teaching interests include immigration rights, comparative ethnic studies, and diasporic cultural citizenship. She has published a multitude of books and articles including her latest book Against the Deportation Terror: Organizing for Immigrant Rights in the Twentieth Century (external link) and chapter publications in Deportation in the Americas, Histories of Exclusion and Resistance (2017), Antisemitism: Solidarity and the Struggle for Justice in Palestine (2017), and New Routes for Diaspora Studies (2012). Her previous appointments include Coordinator of the Comparative Ethnic Studies program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Associate Professor of History at Bowling Green State University. Buff holds a BA from Brown University and an MA and PhD in American Studies from the University of Minnesota.